Current Managerial Competencies in Strategic Management and Decision-Making in the Czech Republic

Institute of Technology and Business, Department of Management, Okružní 517/10, 37001 České Budějovice, Czech Republic

^* Corresponding author: strakova@mail.vstecb.cz

Abstract

Despite the increasingly strong paradigm of management, which is especially visible in the corporate management sector, there have been changes in the perception of strategic management and decision-making. An important indicator of this process is the level or the application of managerial competencies in practice. Extensive research, which was started by the Department of Management of the Institute of Technology and Business in České Budějovice in 2016, and is still going on, has shown the lack of literacy of managers in this field, especially in the case of older managers. From the perspective of objective scientific knowledge, it can be stated that in scientific and research terms, there is a significant deficit in the corporate sector; the transfer of new knowledge in practice is stagnant or non-existent. This makes the situation all the more urgent, as managers who possess knowledge of this issue consider their knowledge to be obsolete and only partly applicable in terms of their needs for business management. The basic prerequisite to remedy this unfavourable situation consists in knowing the actual situation of individual companies of various sizes and the sectors of the national economy. The submitted contribution presents partial results in terms of the knowledge and application of internal and external strategic analyses by companies operating in the Czech Republic. The research included a set of 456 companies from the entire Czech Republic (109 micro-companies, 140 small companies, 124 medium-sized companies, and 83 large companies). The results revealed a critical state in terms of managerial competencies and skills in companies in the Czech Republic concerning the knowledge and application of strategic situation analysis methods. More than 50% of managers appeared to have only minimum knowledge of this issue.